


Set Piece: Ophelia Handing Out Her Flowers

by feralphoenix



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, F/F, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-11
Updated: 2015-01-11
Packaged: 2018-03-07 04:52:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3161912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After taking a catastrophic beating in the group effort to free Midnight City from Lord English, Miss Fortune retires not-so-willingly to the suburbs for her health.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Set Piece: Ophelia Handing Out Her Flowers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CandidCantrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CandidCantrix/gifts).



> _(a future full of ghosts_ – hills, hills, green hills, ugly hills)

01.

The townhouse is still small and cramped, but it’s bigger than your old apartment was and you can maybe get up and stretch without tripping over Aranea’s ten thousand books. This amounts to a great big nothing at all, because you spend approximately eighty percent of your time these days at the community center. Like. Not even because you want to, but because she keeps dragging you.

She pretends it wouldn’t put her out if you decided to flip her off and just wander, getting to know this alien country called the suburbs at your own pace. The first time she said so you laughed so hard you almost ripped your stitches out. You know Aranea better than that, being as she is your sister and you’ve lived with her bullshit all your life.

You go along with it because it’s hard to say no to Aranea right now.

Anyway, the community center’s obviously bigger than the townhouse, but it tends to be full of people at all hours of the day. Aranea is delighted, because these poor naïve suckers aren’t used enough to her to stop her chattering, and they listen even though it holds up the soup line. You are not as pleased. Your track record dealing with your fellow people is notoriously shitty unless you’ve got your mask and costume on. These people are all smiling, friendly strangers, and they’re all really into things like God and keeping kosher and you just want to go home and eat a fucking pack of pork gyouza, okay; more often than not these are the kinds of smile that drop like lies whenever you put a foot out of line.

You miss the city like it’s an organ that got taken out of your body without your say-so. Okay, you don’t miss the assholes, or the catcalling, or the smog, or the sardine-can feeling, or the Neo-Nazi fucksticks that kept putting bricks through your car windows. But you _do_ miss being able to be anonymous until you _wanted_ attention, and you miss petty crooks being a dime a dozen, so you could break some heads and get your name in the paper every week if you wanted.

“Heroes were a dime a dozen in the city too,” Aranea tells you. “If you want to stand out it helps to be in a place where you have enough room.”

You glare at her. It’s not time to serve food yet, all the casual religious hangers-out are sitting at cafeteria tables, and the buzz of their chatter is enough to hide your conversation. By some incredible lucky break, this place never smells like school cafeterias, but there is a continual lingering scent of matzo ball soup and it’s making you hungry and crabby. “It also helps to have, you know, _villains.”_

Your sister raises her eyebrows at you. “Vriska,” she says, “being a superhero had its good parts. I enjoyed being appreciated too. I love the attention as much as you do, I’m not going to try to deceive you at this late date. But I’m done with it now. There are other ways to earn respect than risking a broken neck and a dead sister.”

You swallow and don’t reply. Aranea sighs and pushes a peeled potato and a grater into your hands.

“Would you shred this please,” she says. “I’m going to get the stove ready.”

Your name is Vriska Serket. Last month—in another life—you lived in Midnight City. At this time of night you would be putting on your costume and heading out to prowl the rooftops in search of trouble, already thrilling at the prospect of seeing the name Miss Fortune on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper. Tonight you live in Prospit, you are wearing an ugly apron instead of your badass kicks, and your glorious assignment for the night is to shred potatoes and fry latkes. Wow. Thrilling.

Busy feeling sorry for yourself, you manage to stab yourself in the thumb with the stupid grater, and have to try to keep your swearing under your breath as bright blue wells up from the cut. You stick the offending thumb in your mouth and glare at the oblivious masses. You bet every single one of them’s blood is boring mundane red.

You are still sulking when the door opens and _she_ walks in.

 

 

(02.

The memory that sweeps up, jagged, unbidden:

Lying on your side in the alley, grit digging into your cheek, sticky half-congealed blood gluing your left eye shut. Blurred and swaying against the gulf of streetlight: Your sister held in the air by her throat, lights too fine for you to make out half the time raining off her body like glitter as she repaired her windpipe and spinal column over and over against the encroaching hand. Your knives neatly sheathed in your own body. Your best set of dice so much crushed dust, gummed up in the blood and oil.

Aranea’s voice in the hospital later: “We’re not doing this anymore.”)

 

 

03.

 _She_ has black hair like yours, but straight, curled up around the edges like an actress trying too hard; her eyes are hidden behind red-lensed glasses like something off a supermarket rack. She is wearing a tweed suit with sparkly red ballet flats, and leans majestically on an expensive-looking cane. Is that mahogany? Ivory, maybe? There’s definitely gold and opal inlaid in the thing, and instinct has you itching to convert it into boonbucks, into shelter donations and rent payments and new sets of dice.

But she stands ramrod straight in that way that says to you _cop, lawyer, or baddie._ Your instincts aren’t perfect, but they’ve kept you here this far.

She cackles. Honest to fuck cackles like a cartoon. You watch her over the heads of scarved, hatted cafeteriagoers and the back of your neck prickles when you catch people calling her _Ms. Pyrope._

You have never seen this woman in your life—you’d remember a character as ridiculous as this—but at the same time she’s as familiar to you as Aranea, as hunger, as pain.

Pyrope, whatever her first name is, makes her grinning social calls around the room and then sits down. You bend over your potato grater like you actually give a shit about how these latkes turn out and watch her through your hair.

You have a hunch, and so you bring your hand up to your temple—subtle like, faking a headache. You cast threads of mental web over the interloper and the guy sitting next to her and tug at them.

Your suggestions only really work on non-supers. Aranea keeps talking like you could mindjack anybody if you put in enough hard work and practice, but casting from the back of the party was not ever your thing, not even when you were little and ass-deep into Flarp. Anyway, this is an easier way to test than to go up to this strange stranger’s face and ask, like, “Hi, would you happen to be a superhero or a villain in disguise?” Maybe you are enjoying your vacation less than your sister, but you share her aversion for any more knives in your gut.

So you tug on the threads connecting you to Pyrope and the dude next to her, who’s your control. If she’s a normal like him, they’ll both reach out and bump their neighbor’s plate at the same time. If not…

Faceless Extra gets an elbow full of spinach. Pyrope has the gall to turn around, _sniff_ the air like some kind of police dog, and raise one hand to wiggle her fingers daintily in greeting. At you.

“Shit,” you say, and grate your potato with gusto.

 

 

04.

You were Miss Fortune and she was Ariadne, despite that your innate powers are almost exactly the same, because she took to tugging people along on strings like a fish to water where you preferred to heroically bash people in the face. When you were both just starting out, people tended to have the misconception that you had no psychic powers at all and your sister had gotten the lion’s share, even though really it came down to a childhood of her reading _Matilda_ while you were nose deep in comic books and kicking ass in Flarp.

This worked out just fine for you because it meant that when you were in a tight spot and whoever you were fighting was a normal, you could grab them by the brain and tie them up or stab them on their own weapon at your own discretion.

The papers called you the Spider Sisters when you made your debut breaking up a bank robbery, which annoyed Aranea to no end.

“We are _scorpions,”_ she explained fake-patiently. “We govern spiders the same way we govern water, healing, passion, poison. That’s where the webbing comes from.”

After the third time you broke wrongfully condemned prisoners out of jail, the police stopped calling you anything other than _Spider Sisters._ Aranea seethed, but you were fine with it. You were both still on the front page, being praised by the people who mattered. It wasn’t such a big deal.

 

 

05.

She finds you on the roof, and though you are never ever admitting this to anybody, this is the part where you start to get kind of nervous.

“Did you think,” she says, “even for the slightest moment that I wouldn’t smell what you did there! Because you were very obvious about it, Miss Kitchen Lady.”

She talks in this cheerful, kind of impatient theatrical voice with brightly enunciated consonants. There’s not a single filler noise in there, and she doesn’t drag her words out while thinking the way that you do. Aranea would deeply appreciate the propriety of her speech, but it doesn’t endear you any.

“I was curious, I was satisfying my curiosity,” you tell her. “Wow! Way to make a big deal out of nothing! I wasn’t aware that being interested was against the law.”

Pyrope tosses her chin back and cackles. She taps her cane against the concrete, maybe impatient, maybe considering. “Such impudence in the face of the law! Do not blame me if one day your smart mouth lands you in the slammer.” Your hackles go up—you fucking knew she was with the establishment—but she sounds pleased. “Incidentally, curiosity in and of itself is not illegal; I am quite sure I could make a case about your undocumented use of superpowers to violate the agency of a mundane.”

“Well, you aren’t a mundane,” you accuse. “So get fucked.”

“I might have been! And then I would have to arrest your delightfully cheeky rump, which would be terribly thrilling to me—I am being sarcastic—and quite the, mmm, _misfortune_ for you. There is a thing called walking up to a person and asking.”

You try not to jump at the weight she puts on the word _misfortune_ and succeed, but she probably sees the way you shift your stance so that you’ll be ready to fight or flee. You never thought this day would come, but you would give anything to be Aranea right now, to have the finesse to jack her brain open and see what she’s thinking and what she means by all this.

“Oh, and yeah, that would’ve gone over real well,” you bluster. “Hey, hi, hello, I am just wondering if you happen to a freak with shiny Crayola blood! No real reason!! Just asking!!! In the middle of the god damn Jewish Community Center when it is utterly PACKED with people. Now why are you loitering with intent in an employees only area, Pyrope (if that’s even your real name), or are you just here to shoot the breeze, because I have not done anything and the breeze is nice and full of lead by now!!!!!!!!”

Pyrope cackles again. “Yes, indeed, talk your dirty talk to me. I was curious! And I believe we have already established the legality of curiosity.”

You frown at her. “I would be giving you a lecture about curiosity and cats and the high mortality rate involved, except there is a saying about pots and kettles I think I’d be eating next.”

Pyrope’s grin widens. “You _have_ grown,” she says, and while you are busy wondering what the fuck she means, her expression turns cold and serious. She plants her feet shoulder width apart and gathers both hands upon the head of her cane, taps the end twice in what seems like a private ritual. “And since you have grown, I’ll give you some advice in the hope that it will not be futile: Keep your head down, Vriska. You cannot afford another close call, and the English problem has only just been satisfactorily dealt with. If you are still starved for attention, I suggest you beg for it using some other method.”

The headache comes like someone has stuck a drill directly between your eyebrows. Your vision goes gray, but you aren’t so flimsy that you’ll collapse. This isn’t something she’s done. You’ve had this problem since you got out of the hospital—it’s the only reason Aranea was able to convince you to move—and you’re getting used to it.

Besides, there is something more important than your headache right now. “I don’t remember telling you that my name is Vriska,” you say. You clench your empty hands uselessly. Aranea will yell at you for it, but starting tomorrow you don’t go anywhere without dice in your pockets.

Pyrope flinches as if you’ve poured ice water on her. She takes a calculated step back.

“You have now,” she says lightly. It’s so insincere you can taste it. “Miss Blueberry, you bore me! I think I shall retire for the evening. But keep my warning in mind. Even you ought to have a working self-preservation instinct.”

And, adroitly, she absconds for the door. It closes smartly behind her and you flinch, tugging your jacket closer around you.

It is a measure of how flighty a broad you are that you had assumed your days of being threatened by law enforcement were behind you. You shake, and try to write it off as the temperature. You may never have seen her before in your life, but this Pyrope is unmistakably bad news, even putting aside that somehow she knows exactly who you are.

There’s nothing more dangerous in all the world than a villain who’s convinced she’s a superhero, after all.

 

 

06.

Pyrope turns out to be a community center regular, though she does not even live here. This apparently gives her the right to just show up whenever, and your workplace becomes a hell of cackling cane lady popping up everywhere. Congratulations, your life is now a horror flick disguised as a romantic comedy!

You don’t tell Aranea about your new stalker because she’s pathetically into this Whole New Leaf, I’m Normal Now thing, and you don’t want to ruin that by making her worry and climb back into her super suit for your benefit. Also because you don’t want her to yell at you for your colossal brainjacking fuckup.

As you have the nagging feeling that asking around would alert both your sister and Pyrope herself, you give up trying to find out her first name that way and resort to Google in the dead of night instead. It’s spectacularly useless. Eight pages in and all that’s coming up is some washed-up skater from the nineties with a really fucking devoted fanbase! Nothing about Pyrope the Civil Servant™! Well, you guess if she’s turned to evil for validation because all of the attention for her surname is going to this loser, you can’t really blame her.

You wonder how many pages of hits you’d get if you looked up her alter ego.

The temptation to google yourself is strong, but you know that that way lies madness, so you turn off your laptop with difficulty and go collapse on your bed. There’s laundry to put away but that can wait. It’s raining, and you close your eyes. The patter of drops on the window next to you is beating a counterpoint to the pain in your head. The crisscrossed latticing of the window burns black bars against your eyelids.

It’s not her knowing about the English thing in and of itself that freaks you out, but her knowing your involvement in it. The big man was kind of one of those once-a-decade, everybody-drop-what-you’re-doing-and-go-help-out superheroes and supervillains teaming up schticks that people love to make documentaries about later on. You and Aranea decided to take out the Batterwitch first because mind control had always been _your_ mojo and neither of you really appreciated your monopoly getting taken away.

This ended up with both of you in the hospital and missing all the good parts of everything! No glory. Nothing mentionworthy in a newspaper or on the internet. If Pyrope knows what brought you here, then she definitely knows exactly who you are.

And you are dead sure you have never met her before in your life.

The headache seizes you up and drags you down, down, pulled through your mattress like a ghost and setting you gently on your feet on the old battered rugs in a candlelit mansion.

Somewhere in reality, thunder booms, and it lights up the windows on either side of dream you.

 

 

07.

The rain and your headache are now a basketball pounding the concrete. The mansion is now one of the many dingy alleyways you played in as a kid, and your knees hurt from pressing into the flimsy fire escape landing. Dice rattle. When you come up snake eyes you swear, and your voice pipes. You’re maybe seven or eight.

Across the Flarp sheet from you, your best friend laughs in a high piercing cackle that echoes throughout the alley and makes Tavros drop his basketball down on the ground. Aradia is probably giving you both a dirty look; she’s been trying to teach him to dribble right all morning.

“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times!” says the girl whose face is a blank. “Luck doesn’t matter.”

She reaches out with a pudgy baby finger and knocks your player piece over. You can’t afford real character figurines and she’s not allowed to order things online so you both make do with old metal ones from your sister’s dilapidated Monopoly set. You play as the battleship and she’s the cannon.

You know that smirk; it’s carved into the corners of your psyche. You’ve been itching to wipe it off her face for years, and then it wasn’t just about winning, it was about her holding up a tarnished thing as gold, and putting on the system’s boots to stamp their soles against your throat.

And you wake up with a roaring headache and a terrible urgency all throughout your body. You yank your ratty jeans back on, almost forget to zip them, take your mask out of its place of honor in your bottom drawer, and then you are out the window, you are gone.

The rain batters you as you run from rooftop to rooftop and it’s fucking freezing but you don’t care. It’s keeping you awake.

 

 

08.

She’s there on the community center rooftop, dark hair slicked back by the rain, poised and perfect even drenched to the skin. She has Jury out of its sheath; rainwater flashes on the titanium blade.

“Judge,” you yell. She does not turn. “Terezi,” you say again, panting. “What the fuck did you do?”

Terezi Pyrope scrunches up her black lips like she wants to cry, and apropos of nothing your insides feel like you forgot them back in bed. Even under her padded suit shoulders she looks hunched and small.

“You died,” she says. Her voice is small and brittle. “I fixed it.”

She fixed it. She _fixed_ it. She took your friendship, your rivalry, the only good thing you had when you were a kid aside from Aranea, and she threw it all away.

Then: A hot pain in your sternum, your knees threatening to buckle. The phantom taste of iron in your mouth, and you can tell for once that she’s lying by omission.

“You _killed_ me,” you say suspiciously. She doesn’t flinch.

“And I regretted it!” says Terezi. Thunder booms in the distance and you cross your arms. “Regret did not fit me. I do not like the experience of being useless, Vriska; it is not who I am. A mutual acquaintance was given the grace of stable-loop-free timeline meddling, and among the instructions my dead-end self left him were ones to fix this. To fix _you,_ and by doing so to fix me. You were not supposed to go play the hero and nearly die again despite all my calculations.”

“You killed me,” you say again. “You killed me, you stole from me, and _I_ am supposed to be the thief here.”

“What,” says Terezi, “would you have had me do?”

Her cane is naked and flashing and the weird paradox part of you that remembers her and remembers your death quails away from the imprint of pain but you square your shoulders and stamp across the roof to her anyway.

You get close enough to smack her in the face, open palm, and she sways but it doesn’t knock her off her feet. When Jury’s edge comes up to kiss the side of your neck like a promise you about jump a mile, but Terezi—but the Judge, the worst and most terrible supervillain you have ever grappled with in another life—does not go in for the execution stroke. She drops her weapon with a flimsy clatter, and slaps you like you slapped her; you bite your tongue and swear, and she grabs your collar and kisses you firmly on the mouth.

It is like someone has switched on your entire nervous system—exactly like the photos of Diwali from space that Meenah used to show you to brag, back in college when you were dating, when things were still easy and fine and English hadn’t hit the town like a fucking wrecking ball. You are raw with grief and anger and horror, so raw you want to throw up, but Terezi’s rain-frozen hands have hiked up under your shirt to squeeze your tits and you don’t know how and when your fingers got to be between her legs, and your brain is a confused mess of mismatched memories and Terezi is shaking furiously against you like an engine being revved, and you have no idea what else the fuck you’re supposed to do.

She strips you half naked and shoves you up against the wall and goes down on you, right there on the fucking rooftop in the middle of a fucking rainstorm, which is simultaneously less hot than you would have thought (it’s cold! And uncomfortable!!!!!!!! And fuck, what if there’s anyone creeping on you right now! What then) and hotter than it has any right to be—the rain battering your bare skin, her tongue warm and clever inside you. Your breath starts steaming, and you have to bite the side of your hand to keep from yelling out loud.

You want to finish her off when she’s done, but she steps out of range of your weaky weak post-orgasmic flaily hands neatly and does it herself, quick fingers and quicker hips and an expression like something chiseled out of flint.

“Do not,” she says in a voice that is at once commanding and reedy, “waste what I have especially given you with your idiotic grandstanding! I will be incredibly displeased. You are _my_ misfortune and I am the only one who is allowed to decide your punishment.”

She leaves then, while you’re still quaking and do not understand what the fuck is even happening here. The rain gets worse, but it takes you a few minutes and several sneezes to think to pull your shirt back down and put your pants back on. You can’t see three feet in front of you, which is pretty bad for someone who’s farsighted. It occurs to you to take off your mask, hide it in your pocket or something, and walk home like a normal person, but you take the rooftops home anyway to force your brain to concentrate on not turning you into a splat from a missed jump. If you overthink Terezi and what you’ve figured out right now your head is going to explode.

When you get home you slide down the gutter and go in through the front door. It’s so warm inside the townhouse that your whole drowned-rat body gives off steam. You take your grimy socks off and leave them on the mat, and walk dripping into the kitchen.

Aranea turns away from the stewpot to frown at you, or more probably the mess you are leaving all over the floor. But bless her, she doesn’t ask.

“Get a tissue box and take some cold medicine,” she says. “I can carry stew up to you if you want, but you have to eat it or you really are going to get sick.”

Instead of listening to the sage advice, you stumble across the room and wrap your arms around your warm sister, hide your face in her dry shoulder so she won’t hear you if you cry. You let yourself shake. After a moment’s confusion, Aranea begins to stroke your wet hair.

Your name is Vriska Serket, and your superhero alias is Miss Fortune. You have always been a superhero, even in another life. You are twenty-three years old, you never know for sure whether you have all of the luck or none of it, and the only people who love you unconditionally are your sister and apparently also your archnemesis from a failed timeline. You are too starved for affection for this to be good enough, but it is something. You are a lapsed Jew who likes silly roleplaying games and red shoes and you still love the family that abused and abandoned you as a kid. You hate cities but you still miss them, and you still don’t know if you like suburbs yet.

Your name is Vriska Serket, and against all odds, you are alive.


End file.
